Between Fear and Disappointment: Critical, Empirical and Political Uses of Habermas
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00074 |
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| Author | Ricardo Blaug |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Between Fear and Disappointment:
Critical, Empirical and Political
Uses of Habermas
RICARDO BLAUG
University of Leeds
Since the foundation of the Frankfurt School, critical theory has conceived of
its relation to practice in a number of ways. While it sought to produce a
theoretical analysis which might, in some way, assist those actually participating
in processes of enlightenment, it was also careful to limit its direct application to
practical matters. Theory was, variously, to have indirect eects, to be sub-
ordinate to the primacy of practice, or even to itself be conceived as a kind of
practice. Yet no matter how limited, critical theory always had some irreducible
utopian element.1
Recently, critical theory has received signi®cant adjustment, particularly by
Ju
Èrgen Habermas. His work replaces categories at the heart of the original
project, such as social labour and historical materialism, with a theory of
communicative action.2While striving to retain some utopian content, he has
also inherited the traditional concern to carefully limit the practical intentions
of theory. As he has famously put it, `in a process of enlightenment there can
only be participants'.3
According to Habermas then, provided we understand its limits, theory does
have its uses. It can, he suggests, inform a research programme in the social
sciences, and it can oer some limited guidance for action. Habermas's
articulation of these practical intentions' has stimulated a plethora of attempts,
from across the social sciences, to use his theoretical advances to generate
critique, to guide empirical research and to inform an emancipatory politics.
This article oers a critical survey of the resulting attempts to use Habermas's
work.4
In 1988, Ruane and Todd reviewed a selection of this growing literature and
concluded that its lack of actual empirical content resulted in it sharing the
#Political Studies Association 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
1On the vicissitudes of this element, see M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston, Little
Brown, 1973) and D. Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Cambridge, Polity, 1989).
2Habermas's theory asserts that there are two kinds of rationality used to co-ordinate human
activity. Instrumental rationality involves the strategic employment of means towards a pre-chosen
end. It is oriented towards eciency, towards success, and can be formalized in the language
of game theory. Communicative rationality pertains instead to the generation and exchange of
meaning. It is oriented towards mutual understanding, and can be formalized as a series of
inescapable validity-claims. See J. Habermas, What is Universal Pragmatics?' in Communication
and the Evolution of Society (hereafter CES), (Cambridge, Polity, 1991), pp. 1 ±68.
3J. Habermas, Theory and Practice (London, Heinemann, 1974), p. 40.
4Such a survey is, of necessity, selective. Habermas's in¯uence has now become so pervasive that
it escapes exhaustive documentation.
Political Studies (1997), XLV, 100± 117
excessive abstraction of its ancestry.5Subsequently, their review was sharply
criticized by Strydom for its characterization of the relation of theory to
practice in terms of mere `application'.6The present survey seeks to update and
expand upon Ruane and Todd's review, while at the same time honouring
Strydom's objections. In so doing, we see that while excessive abstraction does
indeed restrict the practical implications of Habermas's theory, there are ways
in which his work oers signi®cant advances to social scientists.
Habermasian critical theory can be characterized as having, ®rst, a recon-
structive/synchronic (time independent) axis, along which lie the theories of
communicative action, rationality and discourse ethics. Second, it has an
empirical/diachronic (time dependent) axis, upon which we ®nd the critical
theory of society (including theories of colonization, crisis tendencies and
cultural modernity) and the theory of social evolution.7The practical intent of
theory then expresses a function mapping the synchronic onto the diachronic.
As conceived by Habermas, this is no mere con¯ation of theory with practice.
At the same time, this function cannot be adequately described in terms of
`application'. Critical theory is not a scienti®c, empiricist-inductivist set of laws
which, once formulated, can be wheeled out to confront an epistemologically
independent world where trees make noise as they fall in the forest, even though
there is no one there to hear them.
The social world confronts us as something which is partly pre-given and
partly the creation of our own actions. To learn is therefore both to make and to
discover. The practical intention of Habermas's theory encourages us to explore
our social world. With the synchronic aspects of his theory operating as a
`relatively permanent interpretative background',8we are urged to carefully
inspect the diachronic social world, and to engage in a critical-hermeneutical
search for learning, a `mutual ®t'9between univers al and particular.
The practical intentions of Habermas's theory should thus be conceived
along critical hermeneutic lines, rather than as an `application' to reality.
Critical theory should help us penetrate beyond mere appearances and reveal
hidden structures. It should change minds, train eyes, exert a pressure on our
intuitions and help us reclaim our individual and collective authorship of the
social world; thus moving us closer to living the lives we wish to live. Habermas
not only wants his theory `used' in such ways, but has so constructed it that
these practical intentions become components of the validity of the theory itself.
Critical theory is, therefore, both validated by and validating of, social scienti®c
research.
If we are to evaluate the wide variety of attempts to redeem this practical
intentions, we must dierentiate between the types of research critical theory
has informed. Ruane and Todd eectively prioritized empirical sociology, and
so devalued other uses of the theory. Even Parkin's more penetrating survey,
though less prone to simply lament the lack of empirical work, does not
101Review Section
#Political Studies Association, 1997
5J. Ruane and J. Todd, `The application of critical theory', Political Studies, 36 (1988), 533± 8.
6P. Strydom, `Metacritical observations on a reductive approach to critical theory: Ruane and
Todd's ``The application of critical theory''', Political Studies, 38 (1990), 534 ±42.
7This formulation simpli®es, hopefully without reducing the sense of, that advanced in Strydom,
`Metacritical observations', Fig. 1, p. 541.
8Strydom, `Metacritical observations', p. 542.
9Strydom, `Metacritical observations', p. 542.
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